We've reached the last Santa's Little Helper episode of The Simpsons' classic era, and do we at least get to end things on a high note? Perhaps...relatively speaking. As with all of the show's dog-centric entries, "The Canine Mutiny" (4F16) and I have something of a rocky history. I remember groaning the first time I saw a promo for it. Did we really need another episode about the relationship between Bart and Santa's Little Helper, particularly when poor neglected Snowball II was still sitting there, waiting for the spotlight that was sadly never coming her way? Heck, by the time it debuted, on April 13th 1997, it honestly felt like Santa's Little Helper had been privileged with more starring roles than Maggie, who is nominally one of the main characters. What the writers were getting out of making these episodes a biennial occurrence was beyond me, but maybe you had to be a dog person to understand. The whole purpose of this mini-retrospective was to go back and see if I could relate to the Santa's Little Helper tales any better now that I am myself a dog owner, yet I'm painfully aware that I have largely been falling back upon the same old criticisms I've always made. "Bart's Dog Gets an F" is slow and uneventful, "Dog of Death" is mirthless and unpleasant, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" is relentlessly dumb, etc. Happy to report, then, that I actually did respond to "The Canine Mutiny" a little differently on my most recent viewing. Not so significantly that it lifts the episode out of the dregs of the era, but enough to give it an edge compared to its predecessors. "The Canine Mutiny" is, if nothing else, the most interesting of the tetrad, by virtue of arising from the show's experimental, notoriously sardonic eighth season. Ron Hauge's script has a little of that characteristic Oakley/Weinstein bite to it, even if the plot itself is really no more compelling than the next Santa's Little Helper outing. And while any further prolonged exploration of the Bart/Santa's Little Helper dynamic feels basically redundant by this stage, for the first two acts or so it benefits by not playing like a total rehash of the things we've seen before. Up until now all of the Santa's Little Helper episodes have involved Homer and Marge butting heads with Bart and Lisa over the fate of the family dog(s), with Bart typically taking an indignant stand where his parents' morals are faltering (except in "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", where Marge and Homer are clearly the ones in the right). So to have a scenario where Bart is effectively the bad guy, betraying Santa's Little Helper under entirely his own steam because he's swayed by the lustre of another dog - well, it's something new at least.
The supplanter in question is a limited edition rough collie from Vermont, trained by the prestigious Major Jonas Fong, A.L.B.D.A., and answering to the name of Laddie - an allusion that's maybe a bit too on the nose, although it might also be a play on the fact that canine superstar Lassie was, across her various incarnations, portrayed exclusively by male dogs (reportedly because female rough collies are more prone to excessive shedding). Bart stumbles across an ad for the collie in a designer catalog, and is enticed by the prospect of owning what's purported to be "quite possibly the world's best dog". Naturally, it turns out to be too good to be true, but it's too good to be true in a subtle way that didn't really resonate with me until I became a dog owner. Now, I feel like I have a better understanding of why Bart doesn't click with Laddie in the long-term, and why he ultimately gravitates back to the chaotic Santa's Little Helper. Guilt and the status quo are obviously huge factors, but there's a little more to it than that. On the surface, Laddie's pedigree credentials are no lie. He'll gather fruit for you, do back flips on demand and water your flower beds (using a hose). But he ends up being not that great of a dog. Because he's really not much of a dog at all. He's more like a human in a dog skin. And would you really want to own a human in a dog skin over an actual dog? If all you were looking for is an impressive specimen you could show off in front of other walkers in the park, then Laddie might suffice, but he lacks the warmth and spontaneity you'd desire from a companion animal. Notice, for example, that while Laddie might be much better than Santa's Little Helper at obeying commands, he doesn't dispense affection anywhere near as freely (the most Bart ever gets is a subdued lick on the hand when he chooses Laddie over Santa's Little Helper). Homer describes him as "snooty", but that barely scratches the surface with Laddie - there's something distant, strange and honestly a little sinister about him (Snowball II certainly knows it). Our suspicions that the collie is not to be warmed to are borne out by the end of the episode, once Bart has decided that Laddie's super-canine talents would be better suited to serving the community and donated him to the Springfield Police department. Then, as a k-9, his big heroic moment comes in busting a blind man for the victimless crime of wanting to get high in the privacy of his own living room. Goddamn. Remember kids, all dogs go to Heaven, except for those class traitors in the Paw Patrol, and that other class traitor from Vermont. (The bad Lassie that bit Timmy gets a pass; I'm sure that was all just a misunderstanding.)
Laddie is the key ingredient that makes this otherwise rather soppy story unmistakably part of the Season 8 crowd (there is one further ingredient that comes up when Laddie has mostly left the picture, but it isn't quite as successful). He is a variation on a theme the show became fascinated with under Oakley and Weinstein, which is the interloper who strolls into the family's lives and fails to integrate themselves into the established chemistry. Before Laddie we'd already witnessed the sorry downfalls of Shary Bobbins and another, iller-fated pup named Poochie. Still to come were Frank Grimes, the replacement Lisa from "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" and, most controversially of all, Sergeant Skinner (held over until Season 9). Laddie is a much less meta example than the others - the dog switcheroo is played entirely straight, and doesn't openly call attention to itself as a challenge to the very dynamics of the series. The most potentially meta thing about it is possibly the title. When you look at it, "The Canine Mutiny" was rather a peculiar choice. Sure, it's an unsubtle nod to Herman Wouk's novel The Caine Mutiny, and it makes for a cute pun, although "mutiny" (a rebellion by subordinates against a figure of authority) isn't really an apt term for describing Bart's betrayal of Santa's Little Helper. Clearly the higher authority being rebelled against isn't Santa's Little Helper himself. It's also presumably not Homer and Marge, who here seem improbably relaxed about whichever dog has taken up residence in their kitchen. No, it makes far more sense to interpret the titular mutiny as one against The Powers That Be, with Bart momentarily deciding that he'd prefer a glamorous wonder dog to the scrawny, dysfunctional couch-chewer the status quo opted to saddle him with back in 1989. Of course, no sooner has Bart made the trade than he realises it was all a big mistake. A dog as perfect and high-flying as Laddie is blatantly not going to gel with the Simpsons for long. As Homer astutely identified on acquiring Santa's Little Helper in "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire", the dog's status as a perpetual loser is what made him such a shoo-in for the Simpsons clan. And as "Bart's Dog Gets an F" had earlier explored (though perhaps not overly adroitly), Bart feels a particular affinity for Santa's Little Helper because he relates to him as an underachieving ruffian.
How Bart is able to obtain a highly-trained rough collie bearing a $1200 price tag (a total that would seriously be a steal for a regular dog in 2025 money) is a matter of simple mail fraud. For its opening third, the episode plays like a limper variation on the previous season's "Bart on The Road", with Bart getting his hands on a shiny new plaything that would ordinarily be off limits to children, opening the door up to all manner of forbidden indulgences. In this case it's a pre-approved credit card he opts to send away for under the pseudonym of Santa's Little Helper, construed in the application process as "Santos L. Halper". Bart applying for the ill-gotten card under his dog's mouthful of a name feels like somewhat of an arbitrary detail (surely it would be more on brand for Bart to come up with a joke name, like he does with Moe?). Its main purpose is seemingly to telegraph Santa's Little Helper's importance to the story before Laddie enters in, although it deftly illustrates Bart's connection to his pet, in implicating the dog as a partner in crime. (It might also be a callback to a reference made by Kent Brockman in "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" to dogs who were mistakenly issued major credit cards, and the others who weren't so lucky.) As with Bart's unlaminated ID in "Bart on The Road", it's a development that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief on the viewer's part, with the adults once again being ridiculously accepting of a situation that ought to arouse immediate suspicion. Well, most of them - here, Comic Book Guy at least is savvy enough to recognise that Bart's credit card has to be a scam, but when Bart takes to ordering copious luxury items from the Covet House catalog, Homer and Marge seem only too willing to let it slide. Whatever misgivings the Simpson parents might have had are swiftly placated by gifts of personalised golf shirts and Vancouver salmon (it certainly was sweet of Bart to be thinking about treating his family in all of this, assuming it wasn't part of a deliberate ploy to keep them mollified) and they spend the rest of the episode being weirdly nonchalant about whatever their son is up to. Even when Bart's masses of unpaid bills finally catch up with him and his extravagant purchases are repossessed, there are apparently no questions or repercussions from their end. Homer and Marge are conveniently out of the house when the repossession occurs (Lisa's explanation that they've gone for a walk with the Flanders is one of those small, random lines that just cracks me up - it's such a mundane alibi, yet it raises more than enough questions in itself), but didn't Marge ever wonder where her swanky new frying pan radio had disappeared to? I get that sometimes you've got to make concessions to keep a story flowing, it's just funny how Homer and Marge have gone from ruthlessly laying down the law in these dog episodes to having next to no clue what's even happening.
Anyway, you've got to love the decadent lifestyle Bart starts living by way of the credit card, right down to answering the door to Laddie in a monogrammed dressing gown. This also made conscious of the fact that his initials are BS, which is a fitting little summary of the situation we're in.
Homer and Marge being this indifferent is kind of a stretch, but it would be truly out of character for Lisa to say nothing. She's certainly aware that something is up, getting to fill her usual role as the voice of impending consequence when she challenges Bart on where his fancy halogen lamps have come from (only to get sidetracked by her own pep pill addiction, the remnants of an excised subplot). But even she seems more resigned on this occasion. By the time Bart turns up with Laddie in tow, claiming to have won the magnificent collie in a church carnival "two towns over", she's practically made peace with her brother's nonsense, asking Bart if he won the dog in a truth-telling contest but pursuing the matter no further. Later, Lisa is the only family member who even notices when Santa's Little Helper goes AWOL, but other than asking where he is keeps her nose out. Clearly, the idea was for this story to be reflective of Bart's personal conflict, and for the rest of the family to get particularly involved would only stand in the way. Meanwhile, it helps with the other narrative Hauge's script is looking to push, which is that Bart was the only family member upon whom Santa's Little Helper could ultimately depend. At one point, Bart comes to the explicit epiphany that "I was the only one who loved him". We know from the prior Santa's Little Helper installments that this isn't exactly true - while Bart, certainly, is the family member who's most inclined to fight for the dog, when all is said and done the others do love him - but the hyperbole makes his betrayal here all the better to wrench viewers' hearts. The repo man notes that a $1200 dog is on his list of things to reclaim, but doesn't actually know what kind of dog he's looking for, so when he sees Santa's Little Helper he makes the conclusion that he's the one and bundles him in the van with the halogens and frying pan radios. Bart, not wanting to lose Laddie, allows it to happen. And if Bart has given up on Santa's Little Helper, you know that poor sighthound hasn't a friend left in the world.
Even before the mix-up with the repo man, Laddie's coming proves detrimental to Santa's Little Helper, with Bart neglecting him in favour of the new dog. He even allows Laddie to take Santa's Little Helper's place as his partner in crime, taking him out into the wilderness so that they can bury the credit card that's belatedly threatening to get him into a wad of trouble. As far as everyone else goes, it apparently didn't take a handsome usurper for Santa's Little Helper to be pushed unceremoniously into the backdrop. Homer hints that he doesn't even receive regular feedings in the Simpson household, Marge refers to him as "wrecked", and we learn that the family never took him to the local dog park (according to Homer, because of his tendency to fart in public), with Marge indicating that they were always contented to leave him to Bart to take care of. In general, Santa's Little Helper is viewed as a liability, a sentiment that isn't confined to merely the family. Milhouse shows up at the dog park (allowing for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reappearance from the Shih Tzu he was seen with at the end of "Lisa's Date With Density") to bitterly reminisce about the time Santa's Little Helper killed his goldfish and Bart tried to cover it up by gaslighting him into thinking he never had a fish ("But why'd I have the bowl, Bart? Why did I have the bowl?"). This reminder of their mutual ghastliness stokes Bart's protective urges, leading into the episode's most singularly baffling moment, when he entertains the worst case scenario of Santa's Little Helper ending up on an old timey English ship where they shovel live dogs into a furnace to make it go faster ("Nah, that's not too likely..."). As his guilt intensifies, the less drawn he is to Laddie's eminence, finding his energy and his eagerness to rescue babies from unspecified peril to be more of a nuisance than any of his old friend's foibles, if it means that they can't even go for a casual walk without having to attend a ceremony for the dog's heroism. We're left wondering which quality the meticulously bred collie is really hard-wired for - valor, or simply showing off (we know he's not hard-wired for virtue, given how readily he takes to helping Bart squirrel away evidence of his fraudulent consumerism). Either way, packing him off to retrain as a police dog seems like a logical outro, though it's one that will obviously come back to bite us horribly by the episode's end.
By now it shouldn't surprise us that the rest of the family, who've spent the entire middle act fawning over Laddie, aren't in the least bit upset or disappointed by Bart's impulse decision to hand the dog over to Chief Wiggum (except for Homer, who a) grumbles that Laddie had better remain quiet to the police about what goes on in the Simpson abode and b) is on principle opposed to giving). Nor, when Bart finally comes clean about the circumstances of Santa's Little Helper's absence (to a point), that they don't get their hands dirty and leave it to Bart to locate their misplaced pet. From a narrative perspective, this was Bart's moral balls-up, so it falls on him to take responsibility. Also for the purposes of this narrative, Bart is the only Simpson motivated enough to search this tirelessly on Santa's Little Helper's behalf, though he at least has his family's blessing in bringing the dog back into the fold. When Bart clarifies that he's going to get the bad dog back, not the good one, Homer responds, "Oh, good", confirming that he understands intuitively that this is the only choice that makes sense.
With Laddie removed, "The Canine Mutiny" loses much of its sharpness, becoming a less interesting, more straightforward quest to restore the status quo. It's in this wonky third act that I'm reminded that, oh yeah, Hauge also wrote "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" of Season 9. I was previously willing to lay most of the blame for that episode's failings at the feet of showrunner Mike Scully, but looking at the two scripts now, it's interesting just how strongly reminiscent "Miracle" is of "Mutiny". Both involve Bart doing something bad and wallowing in a sea of guilt, all while stringing his gullible family along to an absurd degree. Both of them also struggle in figuring out where to take their conflicts in the final act, leading to resolutions that are both contrived and enormously mean-spirited. What "Mutiny" fumbles, "Miracle" handles with even less finesse, but the blueprints are more-or-less the same. Suddenly this all makes sense - it was Hauge, and not Scully, whom we should have lambasted for ruining Christmas back in 1997.
Now fair enough, I think the episode's final problem is intended to be a deliberate inversion on the situation at the end of "Dog of Death". There, we didn't feel in the least bit bad about Bart stealing Santa's Little Helper from Mr Burns because Burns was mistreating him and using him for nefarious purposes. But what if Santa's Little Helper had ended up in the care of someone who genuinely loved him and could probably use his companionship more than Bart? Just how easy would it be to take the dog back then? After making a few inquiries about town, Bart finds Santa's Little Helper living in a suburban home with one Mr Mitchell, who cares deeply for the dog (renamed Sprinkles) and values him as a best friend. Mr Mitchell also happens to be blind and, yeah, this is where "The Canine Mutiny" gets suddenly kinda skin-crawling. It's best summarised by a statement made on the DVD commentary: "This episode did not win any awards!" The scenario of Bart having to steal back Santa's Little Helper from a blind man (because he's too sheepish to ask upfront) is a trite way to end the story, not helped by the icky and mean-spirited treatment given to Mitchell. Mean-spirited humor was honestly endemic to Season 8; it wasn't a trend that originated with Hauge, not with "My Sister, My Sitter" airing a few weeks ahead of it, and there was certainly far edgier cruelty to come with Frank Grimes. The problem with Mitchell's depiction in "The Canine Mutiny" is that it's mean-spirited on two different levels, only one of which I think is deliberate. Mitchell's disability is presented in a way that's evidently supposed to make him seem sad and pathetic and, on the one hand, the writers must have known how ridiculous they were being in making him so pathetic that he doesn't even realise that his other pet, a parrot, is long dead. Obviously his blindness should not have prevented him from figuring this out. Here's a big tip-off - if you've got a dead parrot decomposing in your hallway, then your house is going to stink to high heaven. Of course he would know! (Actually, that's another thing the Hauge scripts have in common - an unwillingness to factor the characters' sense of smell into the equation. If you've just had a giant heap of plastic burn down inside your living room, then your nostrils should be in for quite a treat.) The image of that skeletal parrot is one of those knowingly dumb, borderline surreal moments that makes an uncomfortable situation that extra bit more unsettling (particularly with the added absurdity of having the decomposed bird wear a spotless red bow). Where the script feels more thoughtlessly cruel is in its underlying assumption that because Mitchell is blind, his life would naturally be tragic and lonely, and he'd have no family, friends or social life. The idea is clearly to make him so flagrantly vulnerable that our sensibilities, in wishing to see the status quo restored, are tested, but it feels like such an unnuanced stereotype. Consider also that we only learn Mitchell's name because it's written on the card Reverend Lovejoy gives to Bart; within the dialogue he's referred to exclusively as "the blind man", including by himself, so that his disability defines him. The one detail about the character that's at all subversive or humanising - the revelation that Mitchell is partial to a joint - is incorporated purely to form the basis of our sour gut-punch ending. You bet your sweet ass you get no awards!
There is one good thing that comes out of this drab third act, and I'll consider this atonement for the sins of "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds" in saddling Bart with quite possibly his all-time worst line of dialogue ("Hey look, a really small dog just fell out of Santa's girlfriend!"). When Bart is explaining to Lisa his plan to break into Mitchell's yard and steal back Santa's Little Helper, she's unsurprisingly disgusted by the proposal: "Bart, that is a new low." Responds Bart, "Hey, I'm not saying it's gonna be a dance around the maypole." That might even be one of Bart's best ever lines - it's sassy, highly quotable and can applied to an infinite number of situations. Every time I hear it, I always mean to start using it more in my own life.
A dance around the maypole it definitely isn't, for Bart's attempted burglary goes predictably awry, resulting in him being cornered by Mitchell, who traps him in a closet and telephones the police. Bart decides to be honest about why he's come there, laying the ground for the episode's most mawkish development. With "The Canine Mutiny" so in tune with the sly snarkiness that was Season 8's trademark, it seems an odd choice for it to fall back on the same old tactic favoured by those earlier Santa's Little Helper episodes, which is to take a hackneyed device from the boy-and-his-dog cheat sheet and play it entirely straight. In this case, Mitchell suggests letting Santa's Little Helper decide which of them he would rather be with, by having he and Bart both call to the dog and see who he answers to. On the surface, this should be the lamest of the Santa's Little Helper resolutions, but for the fact that it is genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Not because there's any actual tension as to which side Santa's Little Helper will choose - we all know that Bart has this licked - but because it accentuates how much we potentially don't want to see him go to Bart. It isn't just a matter of Mitchell being lonely and in greater need of companionship than Bart. Let's face it, Mitchell probably would give him a better life than he's going to have with Simpsons. In this episode alone we've had ample reminders of their negligent approach to pet ownership. Going back to the Simpsons means having to contend with Homer not caring to feed him every day, Marge regarding him as "wrecked", the family never taking him out to the dog park and him being generally ignored. Sometimes the status quo really bites. (The other thing that makes me uncomfortable about this sequence is Mitchell calling out repeatedly, "I'm blind! Come to the blind man!" It's all so on the nose that there's no way it can't be part of the joke.) What does amuse me about the sequence is the way Santa's Little Helper seems to lose interest in both of them and start chasing his tail. It almost looks to me like he went to Bart because he happened to be facing him when he came to a standstill. You know what? In my head Santa's Little Helper just did the dog equivalent of a coin toss. It's not that Bart has any advantage over Mitchell or that their relationship is any purer, but simply the way fate mercilessly willed it.
Which does leave Mitchell in rather a sorry position. The alternative solution, to pair him up with Laddie, is suggested but emphatically doesn't work out, since Laddie's only interest in Mitchell is in sniffing out the spliff inside his pocket. But actually, that's okay. Mitchell deserves better than Laddie, whom as we've discussed is really not that great of a dog. After the viciousness of that rug pull, the episode seems to realise that it's going a little too far with its meanness, and that surely, after watching him be deprived of his beloved companion, the last thing the viewer wants is for Mitchell to face arrest for such a minor infraction. Instead, it leaves some ambiguity as to what becomes of him, fading out with an extravagant display of police corruption, as more officers show up at the house to make use of Mitchell's supply of cannabis, and Wiggum makes a terribly unconvincing effort to vibe along to Bob Marley. Meanwhile, the boy and his dog slip away and back to Evergreen Terrace, with Bart announcing an immediate renewal of their partnership as agents of chaos. He's already singled out a prime first target for their mischief: "That cat's been strutting around like she owns the place." Oh yeah, I thought we'd gone a little too long without some kind of jab at the inoffensive Snowball II. Should Mitchell desire a cat, I know a particularly disrespected one going begging.
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